Re: Moving to *Avahi* over howl

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Mon, 2005-09-19 at 11:16 -0400, JP Rosevear wrote:
> On Fri, 2005-09-16 at 15:57 +0100, Jono Bacon wrote:
> > On 9/16/05, Lennart Poettering <mztabzr 0pointer de> wrote:
> > > I doubt this a good idea. Avahi's DBUS interface reflects what Avahi
> > > is capable of and is in no way a generic DNS-SD API. In fact, Avahi is
> > > more powerful than either Howl or the Bonjour in many
> > > respects. Writing a bridge to access Howl/Bonjour via that DBUS API
> > > would be exceptionally kludgy if not impossible.
> > 
> > This is a policy decision. If an abstraction layer was used to
> > abstract away any possible implementation of a technology, GNOME would
> > bloat to hell.
> 
> A thin abstraction layer is not bloat especially when you are are tieing
> in at lower an lower levels of the system.  What happens for instance if
> windows Vista has its own zeroconf implementation, it would be better to
> tie in there.  Or if gnome-keyring would rather use Apple's secret store
> instead of its default.

What if windows had its own version of evolution-data-server, or
gnome-vfs, or widget toolkit, should we unconditionally use those? There
is always a line that has to be drawn where we do our own, and where we
use the system stuff. In this case its not that clear-cut.

Since DNS-SD is pretty close to the system-level its not at all
unreasonable that we should use the system-specific implementation. On
the other hand, Avahi clearly looks like the best choice on Linux and
other free UNIXes, so almost all Gnome users would use that, and would
pay for the extra layer unnecessarily.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
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